Word-Wednesday for December 14, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for December 14, 2022, the fifty-first Wednesday of the year, the twelfth and final Wednesday of fall, and the 348th day of the year, with 17 days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for December 14, 2022
Paraselene
/par-uh-si—LEE-nee/ n., a bright moon-like spot on a lunar halo, otherwise known as  a moon dog. Paraselene is a compound noun formed from the Greek preposition and prefix, para-: alongside, contrary to, and the noun, selḗnē: moon.

This atmospheric optical phenomenon consists of a bright spot to one or both sides of the Moon caused by the refraction of moonlight by hexagonal-plate-shaped ice crystals in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, and are are exactly analogous to sun dogs, or parahelion. Tis the season, but, Moon dogs are rarer than sun dogs because the Moon must be bright, about quarter moon or more, for the moon dogs to be observable.

December 14 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


December 14 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for December 14, 2022
Sunrise: 8:10am; Sunset: 4:27pm; 39 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 10:15pm; Moonset: 12:30pm, waning gibbous, 76% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for December 14, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             20                     44                    35
Low                2                    -37                    30


December 14 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• Martyred Intellectuals Day
• National Alabama Day
• National Bouillabaisse Day
• Monkey Day

December 14 Word Riddle
Why do bees stay in their hives during winter?*


December 14 Word Pun
Beware hiring the obsessive-compulsive as editors…

December 14 Walking into a Bar Grammar
A exclamation mark walks into a bar and orders everyone around.


December 14 Etymology Word of the Week
wit
"mental capacity," Old English wit, witt, more commonly gewit "understanding, intellect, sense; knowledge, consciousness, conscience," from Proto-Germanic wit- (source also of Old Saxon wit, Old Norse vit, Danish vid, Swedish vett, Old Frisian wit, Old High German wizzi "knowledge, understanding, intelligence, mind," German Witz "wit, witticism, joke," Gothic unwiti "ignorance"), from Proto-Indo-European root weid- "to see," metaphorically "to know." Related to Old English witan "to know" (source of wit (v.). Meaning "ability to connect ideas and express them in an amusing way" is first recorded 1540s; that of "person of wit or learning" is from late 15th century. For nuances of usage, see humor (n.). Witjar was old slang (18th century) for "head, skull." Witling (1690s) was "a pretender to wit."


December 14 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1582 Zealand, Brabant Netherlands adopt Gregorian calendar.
• 1702 The Forty-seven Ronin (leaderless samurai), under the command of Ōishi Kuranosuke, avenge the death of their master in Japan.
• 1849 The first chamber music group in U.S.A. gives their first concert in Boston.
• 1882 Henry Morton Stanley (Mr.) returns to Brussels from the Congo.
• 1900 Birth of Quantum Physics: German Physicist Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law.
• 1911 Norwegian Roald Amundsen's expedition is the first to each the South Pole.
• 1933 Josephine Baker performs in Amsterdam.
• 1955 Sixteen countries join the United Nations, including Austria, Finland, Italy, and Spain.
• 1963 Verne Gagne beats The Crusher in Minneapolis, to become NWA champ.
• 2017 The Vatican announces it has rediscovered the lost last paintings of Raphael in Vatican Museum, painted in 1520.

December 14 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1503 Nostradamus, French astrologist.
• 1546 Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer.
• 1631 Anne Conway, English philosopher.
• 1640 Aphra Behn, English playwright and novelist.
• 1738 Jan Antonín Koželuh, Czech composer.
• 1789 Maria Szymanowska, Polish pianist and composer.
• 1791 Charles Wolfe, Irish poet.
• 1853 Salvador Díaz Mirón, Mexican poet.
• 1883 Morihei Ueshiba, Japanese martial artist and founder of the Japanese martial art of Aikido.
• 1884 Regina Ullmann, Swiss poet.
• 1898 Frederick Douglass Hall, American composer.
• 1902 Viola Wells [Evans], American jazz, blues, and gospel singer.
• 1908 Mária Szepes, Hungarian author.
• 1911 Spike Jones [Lindley Armstrong Jones], American bandleader.
• 1916 Shirley Jackson, American writer.
• 1917 June Taylor, American choreographer.
• 1919 Felix the Cat.
• 1951 Amy Hempel, American writer.
  
• 1967 Ewa Białołęcka, Polish writer.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem or pram) from the following words:

• aoristic: /ˌā-ə-ˈri-stik/ adj., indefinite; indeterminate.
• banatee: /ˌbæ-nə-ˈti/ n., Irish, the female head of a family or household; a housewife; a landlady or hostess.
• corvus: /ˈkȯr-vəs/ n., raven; a small constellation adjoining Virgo on the south.
• eustress: /ˈjuˌstrɛs/ n., positive mental or emotional response to a stressor, typically manifesting in increased motivation, excitement, or happiness. Also: something that causes such a response.
• habromania: /ha-brō-‘mā-nē-a/ n., a morbid impulse toward gaiety.
• jentacular: /jen-TAK-yuh-luhr/ adj., of or relating to breakfast, especially early in the morning, or immediately upon waking up.
• mensch: /men(t)SH/ n., a person of integrity and honor.
• prinkle: /PRING-kuhl/ v., to tingle on prickle; n., a tingling sensation, often resulting from a temporary suspension of circulation.
• steading: /ˈsted-iNG/ n., a farm and its buildings; a farmstead.
• villeggiatura: /və̇-ˌlej-ə-ˈtu̇-rə/ n., residence in the country for a holiday; a place that is suitable for a holiday from the city: rural or suburban retreat.

December 14, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
Words of Wit   
/wit/ n., mental sharpness and inventiveness; keen intelligence; a natural aptitude for using words and ideas in a quick and inventive way to create humor; a person who has an aptitude for using words and ideas in a quick and inventive way. Keen, intelligent, quick, inventive, humorous…Wannaskan Almanac is blessed with witty contributors.

Tis the season when we gather with family and friends to share good tidings and cheer. As a public service, Word-Wednesday today offers cautionary advice: While every person is in some way funny, few people can always be appropriately be funny about other persons present during impromptu social gatherings, where alcohol and intimacy are recipes for disaster. Sadly, every would-be wit sooner or later discovers the dangers of such funny business — particularly in terms of how publicly a private witticism may spread. Weapon and apportionment metaphors abound with reference to wits and their witticisms.

Additionally, word has it that there remain only eighteen days until the dawn of a new day in the history of squibs — Wannaskan Almanac’s own home-grown version of the bon mot. So for these reasons, today we celebrate words of wit with a collection of observations.

There is this difference between wit and humor: wit makes you think, humor makes you laugh.

Josh Billings

Wit is a happy and striking way of expressing a thought.

William Penn

Somebody has said, “Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.”

Mark Twain

Wit is the lightning of the mind.

Marguerite Gardiner (Lady Blessington), from Desultory Thoughts and Reflections

Wit in conversation is only a readiness of thought and a facility of expression, or (in the midwives’ phrase) a quick conception, and an easy delivery.

Alexander Pope

Wit is like caviar; it should be savored in small elegant proportions, and not spread about like marmalade.

Noël Coward

Wit. n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary

Repartee is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit.

Molière

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

William Hazlitt

The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes

The Words of the Wisest and Wittiest Men
Like Thunder are echoed again and again.

Arthur Guiterman

Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wit must have a butt and is ill-constituted to paddle in the milk of human kindness.

W. Somerset Maugham

Humor inspires sympathetic, good-natured laughter and is favored by the "healing power" gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular.

Florence King

In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.

Lucretius

Wit is educated insolence.

Aristotle, Rhetoric

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth-Night

Wit’s an unruly engine, wildly striking
Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.

George Herbert

Wit is a treacherous dart. It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible to stab oneself in one's own back.

Geoffrey Bocca

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.

Michel De Montaigne

He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

James Boswell

So pernicious a thing is wit, when it is not tempered with virtue and humanity.

Joseph Addison

Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.

G.K. Chesterton writing about Mark Twain

Wit is often its own worst enemy.

Marie Edgeworth

Of all failures, to fail in a witticism is the worst; and the mishap is the more calamitous in a drawn-out and detailed one.

Walter Savage Landor

It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on, as when they have lost their edge.

Jonathan Swift

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

George Eliot

There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Dorothy Parker

From A Year with Rilke, December 14 Entry
Echoing the Ocean’s Vastness, from Letter to a Young Poet, Paris, December 26, 1908

The silence must be immense where you are living right now, immense enough to allow such tumult of sound and motion. And if you think that in the ocean’s vastness there exists not only the present moment but reverberations of primordial harmonies, then you can be patient and trust the great and indelible solitude at work in you. This will be a nameless influence in all that lies ahead for you to experience and accomplish, rather as if the blood of our ancestors moves in us and combines with ours in the unique, unrepeatable being that at every turn of our life we are.

Blizzard
by Krasi Todorov

Be better than yesterday,
learn a new word today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.







*swarm.